Four decades of antipoverty policy: Past developments and future directions

and obscures the secular increase in real expenditure on means-tested transfer programs taken as a whole. Indeed, Figure 1, which shows expenditures since 1968 in the 80 largest programs in the country, indicates that per-capita expenditure on means-tested programs is higher today than ever in its history. The enormous growth in real expenditure that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, chronicled in so many historical accounts of antipoverty policy, was followed by a decade (approximately 1978–1988) of flat expenditure growth, although the stability of expenditures in that period masks a decline in AFDC expenditures combined with expenditure growth in the Food Stamp program, housing, and child care programs. The period of flat growth, however, was followed by an explosion in expenditure that occurred more Robert Moffitt